‘Carbon Ideologies,’ by William T. Vollmann

William T. Vollmann has been writing big, iconoclastic novels for 30 years, but he’s never imagined a dystopia as terrifying as the one he conjures in two immense new nonfiction books about the damage we’re doing to the environment.

“No Immediate Danger” and “No Good Alternative” are addressed to readers who will be born a few centuries from now. As envisioned by Vollmann, theirs is a barely habitable planet. They flee from “methane fireballs and murderous hurricanes,” live underground during blistering summers and subsist on “recycled urine.” What “you from the future, who understandably despise us,” should know, he says, is that by 2018, climate change was an obvious emergency. Unfortunately, we just didn’t do enough about it.

“As we … warmed our atmosphere and acidified our seas,” he writes, “whatever would happen next stayed comfortably unthinkable, or at least potentially acceptable, back in the days when I was alive.”

A National Book Award winner whose fiction is often set in the Bay Area, Vollmann says these two titles are “one work,” which he’s dubbed “Carbon Ideologies.” Hoping to quantify the environmental and human costs of our energy consumption, he researches coal, oil and natural gas in multiple countries, and makes several reporting trips to Japan, the site of a recent nuclear meltdown.

More Information

Carbon Ideologies

No Immediate Danger

Volume One of Carbon Ideologies

(Viking; 601 pages; $40)

No Good Alternative

Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies

(Viking; 667 pages; $40)

By William T. Vollmann

Read More

The resulting books — both surpass 600 pages — are simultaneously engrossing and, Vollmann concedes, “uninviting.” He interviews laborers, activists and scores of others, and while many of these conversations are revealing, others tend to ramble. He includes lots of numerical tables, which are informative but sometimes cumbersome; one is 13 pages long.

Yet in the face of complex, contested data, Vollmann is a diligent and perceptive guide. He’s also deeply mindful of those who’ve been sacrificed in the name of profits and political expediency. Amid the Trump administration’s rollbacks of environmental protections, these are incontestably important books.

In an introductory note, Vollmann says his publisher wasn’t thrilled that he far exceeded his “contractually stipulated maximum” word count. By his standards, though, “Carbon Ideologies” is but a pamphlet. In 2003 San Francisco’s McSweeney’s published Vollmann’s “Rising Up and Rising Down,” a 3,300-page history of violence.

His first stop is Japan. Though he acknowledges “the attraction of nuclear power — especially since no greenhouse gases are generated,” Vollmann is there to see what happens when something goes wrong. In March 2011, the plant in Fukushima released dangerous amounts of radioactive material when an earthquake and tsunami triggered the explosion of three reactors.

Visiting abandoned “red zones,” he sees houses overtaken by weeds and big bags of contaminated waste stacked in “neat islands.” A handheld device that measures radiation reads “100 times higher than my kitchen counter in Sacramento.” The long-term health effects are still being assessed, but there’ll be plenty time to apportion blame. A Japanese official tells Vollmann the reactor sites won’t be completely “safe” for three centuries.

In coal-mining West Virginia, the news is also grim. According to Vollmann, coal accounts for about 29 percent of the world’s energy supply — and 46 percent of its carbon-dioxide emissions. Cleaner natural gas has reduced coal’s market share, expediting the state’s economic decline. The state’s unemployment and opioid-overdose rates are among the nation’s highest. “The coal’s about gone, so we’re about gone,” says one resident.

In several towns, mining has rendered the water undrinkable; local newspapers regularly list the projects “discharging” into streams. West Virginians made up a sizable portion of “the 100,000 Americans who died from black lung in the 20th century,” Vollmann writes, but some deny that coal has fueled climate change. Noting the size of the earth and the abundance of trees, a pastor asks, “How could manmade equipment put up enough smoke to make a difference?”

Vollmann’s chapters on natural gas — most of which is extracted via hydraulic fracturing, or fracking — aren’t as comprehensive as he’d hoped: “Only one soul even remotely connected to this industry gave me the time of day.” Business is good, and nobody wants to say anything controversial.

Anti-fracking activists are more forthcoming. They blame fracking for earthquakes, water contamination and hazardous methane emissions. But Vollmann serves neither his readers nor the naysayers when he simply transcribes the latter’s stream-of-consciousness commentary. “This used to be a fishing hole, and the fish are funny-looking” since fracking started in Colorado, one claims.

Fracking also yields lots of oil, and Vollmann’s chapters about this fuel highlight our gluttony: America — 4 percent of the world’s population — uses more than 20 percent of its petroleum. Here again, his interviews could have used some pruning. Vollmann hesitates to interrupt his subjects, and some respond with digressive monologues. But his legwork allows for plenty of perspectives.

In Oklahoma, he meets a retired oil executive, who says industry forecasters are optimistic: “Fossil fuels are going to be the primary source of energy for the next hundred years.” And in the United Arab Emirates, Vollmann talks to Indian and Pakistani laborers; they tell of barely breathable air, on-the-job injuries and $300-a-month salaries. “Climate change is good,” one jokes, “because oil company will close!”

How do we reduce the greenhouse gases that, per Vollmann, will eventually turn our world into a hellscape? Some will argue for more nuclear power, but he worries that a Fukushima-esque disaster at an American nuclear plant is “inevitable.” Instead, he says, “our best hope” over the long haul might be solar energy. California agrees; home builders will soon be required to outfit new houses with solar panels.

Meanwhile, Vollmann writes, the environment would benefit if we addressed economic inequality. Under a system that distributes resources more evenly, “the affluent would have reduced their per capita use of energy, while the poor could have consumed more — even as total aggregate consumption fell.”

Alas, he says, we’ve chosen a different route: “I did what little I could, which was nothing, to protect you, my unborn reader, from climate change.” Vollmann spends 1,300 pages claiming to be a pessimist, but I’m not sure about that. The industriousness required to write these massive books suggests that he believes there’s still meaningful work to be done.

Kevin Canfield has written for Bookforum, Film Comment and other publications. Email: books@sfchronicle.com.